Tag: google

A former child chess prodigy and computer game designer from London has sold his company to Google for around £300 million ($498 million) in one of the internet giant’s largest European acquisitions.

Demis Hassabis, a computer scientist, has struck the deal with Google for his secretive start-up business Deep Mind Technologies, which specialises in artificial intelligence (AI) for computers.

Hassabis, 37, has built the company by bringing together neuroscientists and computer computer engineers in an effort to use technology and medical research to help machines to mimic the brain’s ability to improve performance.

He previously led a study at University College London in 2009 that scanned human brains and found “just by looking at neural activity we were able to say what someone was thinking”.

Google founder Larry Page, who has expressed interest in making search commands easier by having an implant in the brain, is understood to have led the move.

Beat Facebook to it

The website The Information claimed that Google had beaten Facebook to the acquisition and had sealed the deal after agreeing to set up an ethics board to ensure that the AI technology was not abused.

Hassabis is known within the computer gaming industry for having “a brain larger than a planet”. He began playing chess when he was four years old, reached Master Standard by the age of 13 and represented England.

He did his first work in the games industry only two years later when he entered a competition to design a clone for Space Invaders. Going into the industry seemed like “the perfect marriage between games and programing”, he has said.

By the age of 16, Hassabis began working at games company Bullfrog and co-wrote the successful game Theme Park — which was based on an amusement park and released in 1994 — in his year off before going to the University of Cambridge. His student friends struggled to believe tha

o believe that he was the author of such a successful product until they saw his name on the packaging.

After graduating in computer science from Queen’s College, Hassabis quickly returned to the games industry. He set up his own business, Elixir Studios, where he was executive designer of a game called Republic: The Revolution, which attempted to recreate a “living, breathing city” and was nominated for a BAFTA.

The Great Gamer

For many years, Hassabis

was a successful competitor in the London-based Mind Sports Olympiad, taking part in its elite Pentamind contest — a sort of mental pentathlon. Hassabis was Pentamind champion in five of the first seven years after the Olympiad was founded in 1997. His success meant that he was described as “probably the best games player in history”.

His next computer game Evil Genius, which was based on a Bond-style villain in an island lair, was more favourably received by critics.

After selling the rights to publishers, Hassabis went into medical science to pursue his interest in AI technology. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for his game designs.

As a cognitive neuroscientist he specialised in autobiographical memory (combining personal recollection and general knowledge) and amnesia. He investigated whether patients with lesions to the Hippocampus parts of their brains suffered damage to their imagination process as well as their memory recall. He completed

his doctorate in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 at University College London and was visiting scientist at MIT and Harvard.

In 2012, he left academia to set up Deep Mind Technologies, developing technology for e-commerce and gaming. The company has a reputation for secrecy. Its aim is said to be to develop computers that think like humans. It is said to employ 50 people, including cofounders Shane Legg, a 40-year-old New Zealander, and Mustafa Seleyman, a 29-year-old Briton.

Deep Mind’s investors include US Tesla car mogul Elon Musk, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel and the family of Summly creator Nick d’Aloisio, who are all set for windfalls following the sale to Google.

According to the Korean Times, Galaxy Glass will connect to a smartphone and allow its wearer to make calls and listen to music. Not to be outdone, Google just revealed new gear for its Glass product: new frames, prescription glasses and sunglasses for the Internet-connected eyewear.

If you’re thinking about buying a Tesla, you’ll appreciate a coming surge in the number of charging stations throughout the U.S. and Canada. Elon Musk shared his tech upgrades for the supercharger network via Twitter. Tesla’s Superchargers, which can provide up to 170 miles of range with just a 30-minute charge, now cover trips between Los Angeles and New York, Musk said.

Finally, Microsoft has bought the rights to the game “The Gears of War” – and they’re creating a new game as we speak. The reason for the purchase is simple: money, according to an official press release. “Over twenty-two million units have been sold across all ‘Gears of War’ titles worldwide, grossing over $1B dollars.”

This franchise, and these fans, are part of the soul of Xbox, Microsoft said. New “Gears of War”? That’s soul food for gamers.

Earlier this week, the media successfully unblocked the Reuters Chinese website, which had been blocked on 15 November. We also unblocked the China Digital Times website, which has been blocked in China for years and earlier this month created mirrors for the FreeWeibo project. These mirrors now receive thousands of unique visits a day from China. But we are just a small team of activists with limited resources. If anyone has the power to implement this technology widely, it’s Google. Here’s what they could do to effectively end online censorship in China, not in 10 years, but in just 10 days:

1. Google needs to first switch its China search engine (google.com.hk) to https by default. It has already done this in the US, but not in China. This would essentially mean that Chinese netizens using Google would be taken to https://www.google.com.hk, the encrypted version of the search engine. The great firewall of China cannot selectively block search results on thousands of sensitive terms if the encrypted version is used.

2. While we provide a pretty comprehensive list of websites that are blocked in China, Google holds the best list of blocked websites, everywhere in the world. If the website that a user tries to visit is blocked, Google should redirect the user to a mirrored version of the same website hosted by Google.

That’s it. Two simple steps and Google could end online censorship by the end of this month in China. Quite possibly they could end online censorship just about everywhere in the world before the new year. Forget about not doing evil – this would be something that we could all celebrate.

Critics of our approach will say that the “do it, they might not block you” argument is tenuous. But that is not what we are saying. What we are saying is: “Google! Do it! If they don’t block you, freedom wins. If they do block you, there will be much more opposition to censorship inside China and the system will be forced to change, thus freedom wins too!”

Is there a better example of a win-win outcome?

We are gambling that Google is big enough and important enough that the Chinese authorities would not dare block it completely. They tried it once before and backed down after a day. They have sometimes made Google services like Gmail excruciatingly difficult to use. But given how essential Google is to so many individuals and businesses, blocking the company entirely would have immediate and disastrous economic consequences.

Our two-step approach is not technically complicated. In the past, we have repeatedly asked Google to make its search engine https by default, but it took Edward Snowden and a bunch of files to make Google do this for the US market.

Every time you click on a Google search result that takes you to a blocked website, Google can detect that the site is blocked. They also have an index of the entire content of the internet. It would be easy for Google to make a change to its search engine, so that when you click on a blocked link, you are redirected to an unblocked version of the page, hosted on an unblockable proxy. Google is already halfway there. Google caches most internet pages and provides them to users. The cache is hosted on a separate domain, which is blocked in China but Google can simply host the cache on a subpath to bypass the block.

It did not take us long to mirror both the Reuters and the China Digital Times websites. The Chinese authorities have not moved to block the three mirrors we have created. The window of opportunity is open for Google to make its move. Google could do what we did in the blink of an eye. We estimate it would take a small team at Google about 10 days of work – but this is Google we are talking about. They could likely do this over late-night tofu pizza.

By Aglaia Staff
In a high-profile Silicon Valley split that comes amid reports of a complicated office romance,Google co-founder Sergey Brin has separated from his wife, biotech entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki.

The surprising development was not widely known until Wednesday, but a representative for the couple confirmed to this newspaper: “Anne and Sergey have been living apart for several months. They remain good friends and partners.” The couple has two children and until recently lived in Los Altos Hills.

Sergey Brin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Brin and Wojcicki, both 40, are highly influential figures in the tech industry and also rank among Silicon Valley’s biggest donors to charity. Brin is one of the world’s wealthiest men and, with Google co-founder Larry Page, one of two controlling shareholders in the giant Internet company.

While there was no explanation for the split and neither has filed for divorce, the tech blog All Things D, which first revealed the separation, reported that unnamed sources said Brin is romantically involved with an unidentified Google employee.

In another twist, the blog reported late Wednesday that a senior Google executive, who previously dated the person Brin is now seeing, is leaving the company. But All Things D said its sources insist that Android vice president Hugo Barra’s departure for a new job is unrelated to Brin’s new relationship.

Brin’s vast stake in Google may not be at risk in the breakup, according to sources, because the couple signed a prenuptial agreement before they married in 2007 — at a low-profile ceremony in the Bahamas where both bride and groom reportedly wore swimsuits.

But the split could lead to some awkward moments in one of Google’s many cafeterias. Anne Wojcicki’s sister, Susan Wojcicki, is a longtime Google employee who now holds a top leadership position as senior vice president for advertising and commerce. Susan Wojcicki rented part of her Menlo Park home to Brin and Page when they first started Google, and according to Silicon Valley legend, she later introduced Brin to her sister Anne.

A Google spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Anne Wojcicki is co-founder and CEO of a biotech startup, 23andMe, which sells personal DNA test kits and provides reports on individuals’ genetic makeup, traits and health conditions. Brin and Google are among the company’s major financial backers. A spokeswoman for 23andMe declined to comment Wednesday.

Brin, meanwhile, has left most of the executive responsibilities at Google to his longtime friend and co-founder, Page, the company’s CEO. But he is an extremely influential figure in the company, often vetting new projects and overseeing Google X, the division responsible for some of Google’s highest-profile “moonshot” efforts, including its self-driving cars and Glass, a wearable computer.

Like Page, Brin is paid only a $1 a year by Google. But he controls nearly 28 percent of the voting shares in the company and has a personal fortune worth more than $20 billion.

As a couple, Wojcicki and Brin were ranked among the five biggest donors to U.S. charities in 2012, after giving away $223 million last year. Their Brin Wojcicki Foundation supports human rights and anti-poverty programs, and the couple also has donated to research into Parkinson’s disease.

They also helped launch a major science foundation, which awards the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, earlier this year along with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and other tech figures.

India is a strong country. We know the factors that have hampered our economy; right from regionalism, chauvinism, archaic laws, lax governance, overpaid economists and debating intellectuals.

The national culture of negativity is accentuated by the fact that people are more focused on what is happening three thousand miles away; rather in their own backyard. Coupled by the tendency to usurp; deny justice and subvert rights.

If the tools of labour are given to our workforce; laws are implemented in spirit rather than on paper; and infrastructure is created, there is no reason why we cannot become a greater power than the Chinese or anybody else. Social movements have to attempt to reform; not become instruments of terror themselves. The fire and multiple insurgencies raging in the country’s heartland, its belly are symptomatic of the current malaise in the system.

As stated in many books, Mao’sChina was a characteristic of its times; meant to overthrow the fractured setup inherent at the time. Our social order is full of inequity; we only have people indulging in coffee-table discussions; and those in the corridors of power turning a blind eye to evils and settling for sycophancy.

A halo of nobility is better if it is practised rather than preached. The news article only exemplifies what the Indian people are capable of; if hurdles are removed and people are properly incentivized rather than consistently belittled. What a vicious web we weave when we practice to fawn and deceive!

Most new website owners have no idea how a website is indexed or used by search engines to list it so readers can access it. “The programs used to list all websites on the web are called spiders, but to get the spiders to list a website correctly, then certain processes, words and links must be directed at the website,” according to web design experts.

The right mix recommended is analyzing the website to make recommended changes, which can include changes to text content on the pages, article marketing, release of related information to your industry and even social network marketing.

As Apple’s annual conference for software developers kicks off Tuesday, all the key stakeholders in the company’s ecosystem will be present save one, Google.

The company is increasingly being challenged in areas as diverse as cloud computing and smartphones. Apple is launching its own mapping application to take on Google. It will unveil integration with its iCloud storage service and the iPhone, in a challenge to Google’s Android OS.

A new line of Mac Laptops is also expected to be unveiled, in what news portals around the world are calling a subtle turf war. Apple also plans to entice more customers to try out its app store.

Apple has spent three years preparing to take mapping back. It has integrated technology from acquisitions such as 3D mapping company C3 Technologies, Canadian startup Poly9 Group and mapping service Placebase.

Already, about 20 touch-enabled ultrabook designs with various styles of foldable, detachable or sliding keyboards running the new Windows 8 system are in the pipeline.

The South Korean technology group said the new Galaxy SIII model would go on sale in some markets in late May and around the world from June. The screen is 1,280 by 720 pixels, it has HSPA+ connectivity, the removable battery is 2,100mAh, and it’s packed with a quad-core Exynos processor. The phone will come in blue or white colours and in three memory sizes (16GB, 32GB and 64GB), with the ability to add memory via a microSD card. It also features ‘S’ Voice.